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LATE-BREAKING NEWS

• As part of a somewhat expensive Amazon ad campaign, we've dropped the price on The Fugitive Heir to $0.99. If this leads to better follow-on sales of The Fugitive Pair and The Fugitive Snare, we'll leave it at this price. C'mon, buy the complete set!

• All current issues of Stupefying Stories are now available free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers. See the right column for links. For non-US customers, these should automatically redirect to your local manifestation of Amazon. If they don't, let me know.

• Yes, we are in fact reading new submissions. Our revised submission guidelines aren't ready for public consumption yet, so you'll just have to send your story to submissions@rampantloonmedia.com and take your chances. One story at a time, please! No multiple submissions and no simultaneous submissions!

SHOWCASE IS MOVING BACK IN WITH ITS PARENTS!

As you may have guessed from the new banner, we're consolidating the Stupefying Stories blog and SHOWCASE webzine into one new site. In the meantime, before it's gone for good, you really should check out all the great stories on the old SHOWCASE site.

Monday, December 15, 2014

From the creator of the acclaimed Campbellian Anthology series comes STRAEON:
a new quarterly exploration of stories that are longer, more complex,
more mature, and more challenging than the norm. If you’re looking for
space unicorns, sexy vampires, or short comedies that end in bad puns,
you won’t find that here.

But if conventional genre stories don’t quite fit you—if you aren’t
comfortable with the genre you’ve been wearing, or have grown too
comfortable with the way it hangs upon your frame—if you sometimes
wonder why you never see stories that speak to who you are, and are looking for fiction that is new, different, and not entirely safe…

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

One of my pet peeves is the traditional publishing industry “All
Rights for the Remaining Balance of Eternity” contract, so when we
launched the e-book version of Stupefying Stories, I included
a “three years and out” self-destruct clause in the contract. To my
surprise we’re still here three years later, and that self-destruct
clause is now armed and ready to blow.

Therefore, this is your LAST CHANCE to buy Stupefying Stories 1.2 (a.k.a., the November 2011 issue) at the special end-of-contract-life price of $0.99! Because as of midnight Central Time on November 30, 2014, this one goes out of print, never to be re-released again!

And now, the catalog copy...

STUPEFYING STORIES 1.2 Released November 2011
No sooner was 1.1 released than STUPEFYING STORIES began growing very rapidly. This book contains more and longer stories than 1.1 and marks the first appearance in our pages of Aaron Bradford Starr, Clare Deming, Sarah Frost, and fan favorite Rebecca Roland, as well as another story from Anatoly Belilovsky and one of the most disturbing horror stories we’ve ever published, “The Oily,” by E. A. Black.
Which has led to considerable confusion ever since. Is STUPEFYING STORIES
a science fiction magazine that sometimes publishes horror or a horror
magazine that sometimes publishes science fiction? Somehow people
fixated on “The Oily” and didn’t notice that this book also contains two
of the funniest stories we’ve ever published, “First Impressions” and “Watch This!”
Contents:

Yes, it’s our original print edition, done as a prototype to
see just how closely we could emulate the look and feel of a vintage
digest-sized pulp in what was initially planned to be a quarterly
magazine. We spent a small fortune on this one, and aside from my never
being really happy with the way the cover turned out, it worked...but it
also convinced me our money was far better spent on paying writers and
artists more rather than on keeping paper mills and print shops in
business.

Nonetheless, we still have a few boxes of copies of this one taking up space in the warehouse, so from now through December 31, 2014, we’re selling it out for the blowout price of $1.99,
plus the usual Amazon shipping charges. Then, as of midnight Central
time on 12/31/2014, it’s going out-of-print, never to be reissued again!

P.S. Be sure to get your copy from K&B Booksellers, as K&B is the only
dealer selling fresh-from-the-box new copies at this price. (Some
optimists out there think this one is a valuable collector’s item worth
$45 or more!)
Contents:

Thursday, October 30, 2014

That's right. For the next 36 hours, STUPEFYING STORIES 1.1 (a.k.a. the October 2011 issue) is on sale for the irresistibly low price of $0.99! Slightly notorious around here for being the last time we ever attempted to publish poetry, issue 1.1 is better known for being the first time Anatoly Belilovsky appeared in our pages, as well as the first publication of the outstanding hard SF story, “Return to Earth” by Ryan M. Jones,
which has since been picked up for several other podcasts and anthologies. STUPEFYING STORIES 1.1 features:

ODE, by Amy Helfritz

THE WINDOW, by David Yener Goodman

THE DEPORTED, by Vox Day

PICKY, by Anatoly Belilovsky

THE CURSED WAIL, by Caileigh Marshall

S&M VAMPIRE GRRLZ: THE MOVIE, by Chris Bailey Pearce

QUILL, by Allan Davis Jr.

REVIVAL, by Daniel Eness

DAVE’S FRIGHT, by Kersley Fitzgerald

OTHER SISTER, by Rich Matrunick

RETURN TO EARTH, by Ryan M. Jones

If you missed this one when it first came out -- if you've been meaning to pick it up but just never got around to it -- this is your last chance, because at the stroke of midnight on October 31 it goes out of print, never to be released again!

Best of all is this little bonus, which you'll find over on the right side of the Amazon.com pages for the paperback editions of both books:

If you buy a new print edition of this book (or purchased one in the past), you can buy the Kindle edition for FREE. Print edition purchase must be sold by Amazon.
Learn more.

An actual book to read when you feel like reading ink on paper, plus a Kindle version to read on your phone or tablet when you're on the move, all for the price of the dead-tree copy alone? How cool is that?

FIVE STARS is the new STUPEFYING STORIES sampler package.* These five carefully selected tales from our earliest issues are all outstanding examples of the kinds of stories we're looking for, because these are the kinds of stories we love to publish. Sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, sometimes brimming over with adventure and excitement and other times simply dripping with terror, these are the sorts of stories that made us fall in love with fiction in the first place, back when we were reading just for the fun of it, and long before we ever dreamed of becoming professional writers or editors.

Whether you're a new friend who's wondering whether to start following STUPEFYING STORIES,an aspiring contributor who's wondering what sort of stories we'd like to see, or an old friend who just happened to miss these tales the first time around, check out FIVE STARS.

Featuring:

"First Impressions" by Aaron Bradford Starr

"Sennacherib" by David W. Landrum

"Teaching Women to Fly" by Guy Stewart

"The King of Ash and Bones" by Rebecca Roland

"Return to Earth" by Ryan M. Jones

Now available in our first-ever simultaneous Kindle and print editions!

* Personally, I think of FIVE STARS as our Greatest Hits EP, but whenever I say that, I end up having to explain what EPs were, which always segues into a discussion of my theory that short stories are the Top 40 hit singles of the literary world, and pretty soon we've gone so far off-topic that we've completely lost the trail of breadcrumbs and that dicey-looking gingerbread cottage is beginning to look like an attractive place to bed down for the night. It's a sampler, okay?

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

After more "learning experiences" than I like to think about, our first print-on-demand book, Scout's Honor, is finally debugged, finished, approved, and ready to go. Today you can get it at this link (https://www.createspace.com/4958544) but over the next few days it will be percolating out to Amazon worldwide, and then out to distributors, bookstores, and...well, basically, everywhere.

Wow. The mind reels. Good thing Henry's already finished the sequel, Scout's Oath, and we're working on releasing that in September.

And yes, this means from that this point forward (and retroactive back to STUPEFYING STORIES 1.12), everything we release will come out in Kindle, epub, and print formats. In time we'll even make it to releasing books simultaneously in all formats.

I now consider myself a fully qualified expert on the subject of converting author's manuscripts to p.o.d. books, and am available for consulting at modest rates.

One of the secret pleasures of editing a short-story magazine is that you get to meet some very talented writers, long before they become well-known names. Sometimes you watch them develop slowly, as they learn the craft and develop their skills, while other times they just sort of erupt, and produce a string of great stories right from the start.

Judith Field is that second kind of writer. I knew I was seeing something special the first time I read "The Prototype," but then, when she followed up with "The Night the Cat Crept In," "Leaky Magic," "Diva," and "Full Fathom Five," I realized she was only getting started.

It's the nature of the short-story form that writers eventually outgrow it. Sooner or later, some major publisher is going to sign her to a nice big contract for a big fat novel, or some television producer is going to discover her Cleopatra Court stories and make her rich and famous, and then we'll be left saying, "Ah yes, Judith Field. I knew her when..."

But right now, today, it's my pleasure and privilege to present these sixteen stories—fourteen never-before published, and two reprints of stories you may have missed the first time around—that show the range of Judith's story-telling talents. Sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, sometimes romantic, sometimes disturbing—sometimes all four in the same story!—but always a good, solid, entertaining story, well-told.

If you've been following us on Facebook, you know that for the crew here at STUPEFYING STORIES, this past year has been one filled with challenges and changes. If you haven't been following us, never mind: what matters now is that with this issue, we begin our fifth year of publication, with new tools, new technologies, some new people in certain key positions, but with the same dedication to bringing you the best stories we can find, delivered directly to your e-book reader, phone, tablet, mobile device—or rolling out very shortly, to your mailbox, in the form of printed, bound, assemblages of paper!

(We've been told they're called "books." How quaint.)

To those of you who have stuck with us through the "interesting" times, we say: thanks for your patience, understanding, and support. And to both longtime fans and those who are just discovering us for the first time, we say: welcome aboard and buckle up! We have insanely ambitious plans for Year Five, and it's going to be an exciting ride.

Saturday, July 26, 2014

Rampant Loon Press is pleased to announce the release of our first original novel: Scout's Honor: A Planetary Romance, by Henry Vogel.

Currently available for Amazon Kindle (and already a best-seller with twenty reader reviews!) Scout's Honor will be available in the Nook Press and Apple iTunes store shortly, and (now this is the part we're really excited about) in print format on Friday, August 1.

Watch this space for more details. And now, without further ado, the marketing copy...

When Terran Scout David Rice climbs from the wreckage of his starship’s
escape pod, he finds himself transported from the space age to the steam
age in the blink of an eye. Drawn to the sounds of fighting, David
immediately throws himself into a desperate battle against overwhelming
odds to save the life of a beautiful young princess.

Now, marooned without hope of rescue, David is swept into a world of
steam-powered airships, treacherous pirates, brutal savages,
bloodthirsty monsters, royal machinations, and plots within plots, where
matters of strength and honor are most often settled with the clash of
swords. As he struggles to learn the strange ways of this new world and
who he can trust, one thing becomes clear to him: he must put aside his
growing feelings for Her Highness and do everything in his power to
return her to her family, even though this means giving her up to the
prince she’s pledged to marry.

Told in a relentlessly fast-paced and breathless style, SCOUT’S
HONOR is an exciting modern homage to the classic tales of planetary
romance made famous by writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Leigh
Brackett, as well as the cliffhanger-driven energy of the early science
fiction movie serials. If you like your heroes unabashedly heroic, your
heroines feisty and true, and your plots filled with dangers, twists,
turns, and double-crosses upon triple-crosses, you’ll enjoy SCOUT’S
HONOR.

Monday, March 3, 2014

STUPEFYING STORIES 1.12 (a.k.a., the March 2014 issue) is now live on Amazon and selling in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, India, and Japan. For sales links, samples, and more information, see the SHOWCASE site.

STUPEFYING STORIES is currently CLOSED to unsolicited submissions while we concentrate on releasing new books. We will resume reading new submissions for STUPEFYING STORIES, SHOWCASE, and the STUPEFYING STORIES PRESENTSline on June 1, 2014.

Note also that this closure affects STUPEFYING STORIES only. STRAEON remains open to new submissions.

Friday, February 21, 2014

The changes announced in SHOWCASE #14 are already paying off, as SHOWCASE #15 rolls out right on schedule this week. If you're looking for the latest news, latest download links, and best of all, FREE STORIES, check out our companion webzine, STUPEFYING STORIES SHOWCASE, now ready for your reading pleasure at this link:

Monday, February 17, 2014

Effective March 1, 2014,STUPEFYING STORIES will be closed to unsolicited submissions until June 1, 2014.

The short explanation is that the volume of new submissions we're receiving is interfering with our ability to release new books on schedule. For a more complete explanation, see the editorial in SHOWCASE #14.

If this works as expected, we will again be closed to unsolicited submissions from October 1, 2014, to December 31, 2014, and thereafter be on a three-months-on/three-months-off reading schedule.

Please note that this change does not affect STRAEON, which has a separate submissions queue and reading schedule.

ATTENTION, WRITERS. Beginning March 1, 2014, Stupefying Stories will be closed to unsolicited submissions until June 1, 2014. For the explanation of why we're doing this, please read the editorial in SHOWCASE #14.

Thursday, January 30, 2014

First, a few words from the publisher:
M. David Blake’s magnum opus, the 2014 Campbellian Anthology, is now available for download! This book attempts to collect in one volume representative works by most of the writers eligible for this year’s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. We don’t have them all—there were a few we couldn’t get—but all the same, this book contains more than 860,000 words of fiction by 111 authors, and best of all, it’s not merely free, it's DRM-FREE.

But it’s only available for a limited time, so download your copy soon, by clicking on one of these links and selecting “Save file.”

UPDATE 02/02/14 7:30PM CST: Due to the staggering amount of web traffic this book is generating--more than 3,500 hits in just the past 90 minutes--we are adding more download sites. The kind folks at Writertopia.com, StarShipSofa.com, and Tor.com are now hosting mirror sites, and we will be announcing more mirror sites as they come online. Thank you for your interest and your patience.

StarShipSofa mirror site: (the .mobi and .epub files are zipped and must be unzipped before use)
Mobi | Epub | Cover

Tor.com mirror site:
Mobi | Epub

Don't have a Kindle or other e-reader? Then use the free Kindle Reading App, available for most computers, tablets, or smart phones, the Kindle Cloud Reader, that lets you read .mobi files in your web browser, the Nook Reading Apps, which are comparable but for .epub files, or any one of about a gazillion other epub reading apps that are available for download, and mostly for free. Let us know if you find one you really like and would recommend!

UPDATE: We've learned that some web browsers attempt to open the .mobi or .epub files directly, most often producing a window full of gibberish. If you click on one of the download links and it does not offer you the option to save the file, try right-clicking on the link and selecting the "Save Link As" option. (Wording may vary, depending on your choice of browser.)

ANOTHER UPDATE: We've discovered that while our web hosting service provides us with unlimited bandwidth, there's a hard limit on the number of download connections that can be open simultaneously. We've since upgraded our service and quadrupled the number of simultaneous connections permitted. If you tried to download this book earlier and got HTTP Error 503 - Service unavailable, try again now.

And now, a few words from the curator:

Here We Go Again(or: wait, are we still
here?)

A little over a year ago, a small
group of us had a crazy idea. “What
if,” we said, “there was a way
everyone eligible for the Campbell
could publicize their work at the
same time, so that readers might
have some idea of who we are?”

Now, I don’t recall every name who
was part of the original discussion
(I could check, but that would be
work, and I’m plumb tuckered out
after assembling this tome),
although at some point I volunteered
to oversee an anthology if the
others would all agree to
participate. That first volume had a
very respectable showing, with 43
writers represented by a combined
total of roughly 350,000 words.

What a difference a year makes! The
volume you now hold in your hands is
considerably larger, and includes a
multitude of works from 111
contributors, spanning more than
860,000 words. (Should anyone be
curious, that exceeds the combined
total in George R. R. Martin’s A
Storm of Swords and A
Dance with Dragons, which
are—so far, at least!—the two
longest volumes from A Song of
Ice and Fire.)

It is big. It is very big. And
judging from this year’s response,
next year’s volume will likely be
larger.

Now, any standard anthology
introduction might interrupt itself
at this point with some self-assured
bluster about how much you, the
reader, will enjoy every smidgen of
the contents.

You won’t. There will be some
stories in this volume that you
dislike, perhaps even strongly, and
that’s okay. Every writer whose work
is represented herein still
accomplished something remarkable in
attaining a specific level of
publication, and by doing so earned
a place within these pages. I
encourage you to investigate each
and every one, but I make no promise
about how you’ll feel about the
stories that landed them here, or
the works they elected to share.

Here’s a secret: You don’t have to
read this entire anthology for it to
serve a purpose and be valuable to
you. You’re allowed to skip around.

So you’ve already spotted the next
Adams, Butler, or Cherryh? Try the
next Xue, Yolen, or Zelazny… or
anything in between.

A story lost you along the way, or
did something you’ve already seen
too many times? Try a different
story, or a different excerpt, or
even a different writer.

There are a lot of words in this
volume. I can’t tell you where to
focus your attention; by agreeing to
play host, I also agreed to remain
impartial. That doesn’t mean I don’t
have favorites (I do), but it means
I ask you to decide upon your own.

Here’s another secret: If you do
read every word in this anthology,
and investigate all the links for
those currently known to be
eligible, you’ll probably discover a
new favorite. At least one. And if
you do—if you, as a reader, connect
with even a single new writer—then I
will feel very, very good about this
year’s installment of the Annual
Campbellian Anthology.

Now, go make a friend. Your writers
are waiting.

— M. David
Blake

What You Should Do Now: If
you plan to nominate
anyone—regardless of whether or not
that individual chose to participate
in the 2014 Campbellian
Anthology—as a recipient of
the John W. Campbell Award for Best
New Writer, please visit www.loncon3.org/memberships
and purchase at least a
“Supporting” membership. Doing so will allow you to nominate
for both the Campbell and Hugo
Awards (if you register before 31
January 2014), receive the 2014 Hugo
Voter Packet, and vote on the final
ballot.

Please Note (from the website):
“Members of Loncon 3 who have an
Attending, Young Adult Attending or
Supporting membership by 31 January
2014 are eligible to nominate for
the Hugo Awards and the Retro-Hugos.
Equivalent members of LoneStarCon 3
(the 2013 Worldcon) and Sasquan (the
2015 Worldcon) at that date are also
eligible to nominate.”

Unless you are a member of one of
those conventions by 31 January
2014, you will not be
allowed to nominate… but you will
still be allowed to enjoy the 2014
Campbellian Anthology.

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Stupefying Stories is a production of Rampant Loon Media LLC. The articles and images posted on this site are the copyrighted properties of their respective creators. The opinions expressed in posted articles and associated comments are those of the authors and readers and do not reflect the views of Rampant Loon Media LLC.